PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS/INGLÊS E LITERATURA CORRESPONDENTE
‘IS THIS THE PROMIS’D END?’
REINVENTING KING LEAR FOR A BRAZILIAN AUDIENCE
por
MARINA BEATRIZ BORGMANN DA CUNHA
Dissertação submetida à Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina em cumprimento parcial dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de
MESTRE EM LETRAS
FLORIANÓPOLIS SETEMBRO 2003
the Promis’d End?” Reinventing King Lear for a Brazilian Audience, foi
julgada adequada e aprovada em sua forma final, pelo Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, para fins de obtenção do grau de
MESTRE EM LETRAS
Área de concentração: Inglês e Literatura Correspondente Opção: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa
_________________________________ Mailce Borges Mota
Coordenadora
_________________________________ José Roberto O’ Shea (UFSC)
Orientador e Presidente
_________________________________ Roberto Ferreira da Rocha (UFRJ) Examinador
_________________________________ Anelise Reich Corseuil (UFSC)
Examinador BANCA EXAMINADORA:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In completing a project that has engaged me for a good number of days and nights, I would like to thank the PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM INGLÊS of the UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA, and all its professors who enabled me to write this thesis. I have to thank CAPES for a research grant in 2002. I am especially indebted to professor José Roberto O’Shea, my advisor, who promptly accepted me and gave me fundamental academic support. I cannot sufficiently express what I owe to his critical judgment combined with scholarship and sensibility.
I am also happy to remember that when the mornings were still night, Joe Rega, my colleague in studies distracted a sometimes sleepy driver with Sufi stories and loud Gospel songs. Among all people I think especially of Ron Daniels, who generously shared his expert knowledge of Shakespeare and whose comments have been invaluable. Sergio Britto, who, being a king, personally provided controversy upon which I have drawn. Samuel Coppage, Kitty Penny and Robert Bray, my friends from America, for encouraging me. Madame Andrietta Lenard with the example of her life. And to Beatriz Niemeyer, who not only read but listened at the most inconvenient hours, not once but several times, I am more indebted than she will ever know.
ABSTRACT
“IS THIS THE PROMIS’D END?”
REINVENTING KING LEAR FOR A BRAZILIAN AUDIENCE
MARINA BEATRIZ BORGMANN DA CUNHA
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA 2003
Supervising Professor: José Roberto O’ Shea
As its title suggests, the core of this thesis is the play King Lear by William Shakespeare and the various possibilities and impossibilities inserted in the performances of different productions, starting from the Elizabethan theatre in England, when the play was originally released, until Brazilian contemporary years. Although this study has King Lear as its primary focus, other Shakespearean plays in performance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Brazil were also addressed especially in their relatedness to their socio-cultural context. Drawing mostly on Jay L. Halio’s theoretical paradigms this study proceeds with a detailed examination of Rei Lear production directed by Ron Daniels in 2000-2001, a production simultaneously concerned with commercial issues and the desire to communicate with a contemporary Brazilian audience.
RESUMO
Como o seu título sugere, o núcleo desta dissertação é a peça King Lear de William Shakespeare e as várias possibilidades e impossibilidades inseridas em performances de diferentes produções, começando com o teatro Elisabetano na Inglaterra, quando a peça foi originalmente estreada, até chegar ao Brasil contemporâneo. Apesar de o presente estudo ter
King Lear como objetivo principal, outras peças de Shakespeare em performance durante os
séculos dezenove e vinte no Brasil também foram consideradas especialmente em suas relações com o contexto sócio-cultural. Baseando-se principalmente nos paradigmas teóricos de Jay L. Halio este estudo prossegue com um exame detalhado da produção Rei Lear dirigida por Ron Daniels em 2000-2001, uma produção simultaneamente preocupada com questões comerciais e o desejo de comunicar-se com uma audiência brasileira contemporânea.
Número de páginas: 130 Número de palavras: 40.965
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: King Lear in Performance: Possibilities and Impossibilities 1 Chapter 1: King Lear in Performance in England 9
1.1: At Shakespeare’s Time 9
1.2: In the Restoration 18
1.3: In the Eighteenth Century: The “Age of Garrick” 22
1.4: In the Nineteenth Century 25
1.5: In the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 30
Chapter 2: Shakespeare in Performance in Brazil: King Lear 39
2.1: The Nineteenth Century: João Caetano 39
2.2: The Nineteenth Century: European Companies 46
2.3: The Twentieth Century: “O Teatro do Estudante do Brasil” 50 2.4: A Contemporary Approach: Some Recent Productions in Brazil 53 2.5: Tereza Amaral’s Rei Lear with Luiza Barreto Leite: 1975 57
2.6: Celso Nunes’ Rei Lear with Sérgio Britto: 1983 64
2.7: Ulysses Cruz’s Rei Lear with Paulo Autran: 1996 72 Chapter 3: Ron Daniels’ King Lear with Raul Cortez: 2000-2001 78
3.1: Preliminaries 78
3.2: Constructing the text 83
3.3: Constructing the set design and costumes 95
3.4: Constructing the characters 103
3.5: Stage business, reception and overall coherence 112
Conclusion: “Is This The Promis’d End?” 119
KING LEAR IN PERFORMANCE : POSSIBILITIES AND IMPOSSIBILITIES
The life a play has in the mind may be very different from the life it has on the stage. King Lear, which is a long and complex work, may rarely have been acted in full, and has usually been cut, rearranged or reworked for performance.
R. A. Foakes (“King Lear” The Arden 4)
Many versions of performance criticism have been written, and the above epigraph works nicely as an introduction to text/performance dichotomy questions since the craft of theatre involves a great deal more than people talking on a stage. Foakes perceives that “What perhaps most distinguishes Shakespeare’s language from everyday modern usage is its richness, density and flexibility; the cumulative effect is to open up resonances and implications in such a way that the possibilities for interpretation seem inexhaustible” (8). In practice, even under the best of circumstances, when scrupulous care has been taken to establish what the original state of the work might have been like when originally written, the simple act of performing Shakespeare for a contemporary audience constitutes an intention — sometimes controversial — to integrate the play into the experience of the modern world.
Jay L. Halio considers that “the evidence from multiple-text plays shows that neither Shakespeare nor his fellows regarded his scripts as beyond revision or in any sense untouchable” (Understanding 9). If we try to situate Shakespeare in this spectrum it is easy to note that this attitude allows contemporary directors to use Shakespeare’s language and plots as occasions to deliver their own messages. Performances are aesthetic experiences that should
not be reduced to some easily-articulated message, since the meanings and significances of a given production are always primary in importance. To the audience is left the choice to accept them or not.
Although this study has a single primary focus, King Lear on the stage and in the provoked responses from the audience, each chapter approaches its particular topic. In the first chapter I unfold a brief panorama of theatrical performances in England, starting with the period referred to as the Renaissance, since this period sees a major cultural shift, and also because King Lear was written and first performed at that time. The analysis of King Lear in performance involves yet another complicating circumstance. Though I have referred to the text of the play, the text does not exist in a single authoritative version, since it is a conflation of two originals, Quarto 1(1608) and the Folio (1623). I adopted the position that neither of the texts is to be dismissed, but rather represented the play as a valuable reference which provides a model of discourse contributing to theatre studies.
At the same time, of the many controversies that surrounded King Lear, I certainly have to add the manner in which its reconstruction can be seen as an expression of political and social beliefs. Consequently, my study locates codes and meanings under a specific historical circumstance, rather than assuming that the performance text itself contains or produces immanent meanings. In simpler terms, chapter I provides a historical overview of the play in performance in England. It starts with a hint of the Elizabethan period and follows until the contemporary advent of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and my intention is to show the relationship between culture and commodity as it emerges from the past to an age of mass-produced cultural artifacts.
relationship to a mixed Portuguese/Brazilian audience. It starts with João Caetano, who under the social and political tensions of his time, struggled to create and maintain a national company, competing with the antagonism of some of his compatriots and the foreign troupes, which by the end of the century regularly visited the country. João Caetano, who, being an actor-manager performed mostly French adaptations, transcended the barriers separating the classics and was simultaneously an icon of popular and elite culture.
Moving on to the third decade of the twentieth century I take a look at the successful attempts made by Paschoal Carlos Magno and the Teatro do Estudante do Brasil, having students as actors recasting Shakespearean texts translated from English. With a distinguished interpretative community, and approaching the text with a different set of strategies, the group proposed the beginning of the “insurrection” against the commercial theatre.
For the performance portion of my analysis, I selected four contemporary Brazilian productions of King Lear, in part because they represent an attempt to popularize Shakespeare, and also because they allowed me better to evaluate the relationship between a text and its reception. The first studied production is from 1975, directed by Maria Tereza Amaral with Luiza Barreto Leite performing the main role of the play. My focus then shifts from being merely historical to the nature of critical practices generated in recent times, expanding the connotative possibilities of the term “Shakespearean”, so as to include issues of language and power, as these were emerging in the complex and difficult period we had in Brazil in the 1970s. The choice of these productions, ranging from 1975, when our country was under a military government, to 2001, is not accidental and follows from both practical and theoretical reasons. In choosing them I was aware that in the scope of this thesis I could not aim at an encompassing analysis of Shakespeare’s drama performance as a whole, but rather focus on a small number of case studies, for it would reduce the universe of research. My goal is to place
each production within a larger contextual field and to suggest the extent to which the meaning and significance of each are intimately tied to the circumstances in which it was produced and received.
In particular, I also understand performance in the sense proposed by Jay L. Halio, when he provides a number of questions that “should help audiences inquire more deeply into the nature of their experiences during and after witnessing a Shakespeare play in performance” (2). In such context the play reveals and negotiates meanings that might be different, since the spectators attending performances do not collectively respond in the same way.
Moreover, the way the classic text is treated, through the director’s choices, as contemporary, with images that speak to an audience of a definite period of time, exploring the range of interpretations that performance provides and which sometimes can expand and complicate meaning, will also deserve attention. Also important to remember is the fact that any study in performance requires an understanding of the play in its complexity, contradictions and perceptions of others, being the audience to which the production is addressed, the most valuable, and sometimes extremely varied, element. What matters in performance is not only what the actors say but the way they say it, while exploring the singular cultural identity of the audience to which the production is addressed. Therefore, mostly through the Brazilian productions selected, I expect to perceive the development of Shakespearean performances over the decades, and indicate some of the possibilities of dialogue between a contemporary approach and the Elizabethan text.
The above argument, however, implies that the thoughts and events of a period and its literary production cannot, I think, be historically reproduced, since every new representation comes marked not only by the social structure in which it is now inserted, but also, and
the past, we can also reflect on the contradictory nature of the contemporary generation’s beliefs, especially because it is more in tune with technology than any other before. Certainly, when it comes to contemporary productions of a play such as King Lear, undertaken with the full cooperation of not only the directors themselves but of a number of artists and technicians involved, in practice we are confronted with something original. However far from what we presume to have been Shakespeare’s intentions, the attempt serves to integrate the Elizabethan plays into the experience of modern world, and there’s always an act of discovery that connects and redefines linguistic and cultural codes.
Although contrasts can certainly be added to new productions in order to promote a Shakespeare “freed” from the English traditions, it is impossible to deny that “it is through the text that one can find Shakespeare’s truth,” as stated by Ron Daniels, who directed the 2000-2001 production of Rei Lear. At the same time, as mentioned before, my purpose here is not to analyze the language in a limited sense, but as a way to reveal the multiple possibilities inscribed in the performance of a reshaped text. More broadly, a close look at a few of the more significant productions can tell something not only about the play itself, but also about how Shakespeare functioned in twentieth-century Brazilian culture.
My main focus throughout this study will be on contemporary productions, but it might be of interest at this point to remember that some of the productions under my scope have a big time gap, which certainly must have reflected a different perception of the surrounding reality. In the 1970’s, for instance, many directors in Brazil seemed to bend over political issues, and theatrical productions “feel they have failed in their civic duty if they have not directly confronted social and political issues in their work”, as suggested by Benedict Nightingale (231).
In chapter III I take a detailed look at a Shakespearean project, one that could be said to symbolize a transition in terms of dramatic production. Here my intent is to gauge the nature of Ron Daniels’ achievement and, more broadly, to show the relationship between culture and commodity as it emerges in the age of mass-produced cultural artifacts. My discussion of Rei Lear directed by Daniels, though also concerned with production and reception, discusses as well Daniels’ approach to the play and his desire to respect the original text, while at the same time takes the liberty of expanding all the connotative possibilities that might exist in Brazilian Portuguese. Shakespeare is traditionally associated with high culture, but, as I intend to demonstrate, some of the analysed productions are distinct from this reputation, being more of popular culture variety. My study will be to seek out the range of possible realizations, since there would be little point in trying to pin down a single meaning for each line, but to recognize that a play remains open to various interpretations.
To analyse these performed versions, textually as well as culturally, is mostly to reveal a particular community to whom they were addressed. However, in addition to these social and cultural considerations, Shakespeare’s plays actually unfold in no specific place at all, at least in no place that needs to be specified. Viewed in this way, the words of a text could never be mistaken for the whole content of the play. It is often referred that throughout Shakespeare’s plays, and King Lear especially, there is a sense of a traditional order that is being torn apart. The play focuses on the realities and problems of living in a disordered world, as Shakespeare is concerned with asking questions rather than offering any answers: “Now, Gods that we adore, whereof comes this?” (1, 4, 299). Again, the lines can be nicely ambiguous and to the audience is left the chance to answer.
characters are able to give on stage. Shakespeare wrote his plays adding elements that remain open to various interpretations since his plays do not come with a message but with an increased awareness of the problems and choices that humanity has to face up. Yet, even if at the moment of performance, when the drama comes alive as never before, with actors creating with all their powers, part of the audience feels unable to grasp a Shakespeare play in its entirety. The discussion of how to construct a critical/individual response is obviously very abstract, and the effect of this is that King Lear raises fundamental questions about the whole nature and meaning of life. No wonder some stage directions often changed and the kind heart of Dr. Johnson found the fate of Cordelia unbearable. According to Kenneth Muir, many critics have echoed Johnson’s complaint that “Shakespeare has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is more strange, to the faith of the chronicles” (xxxi), but crowning his thesis about the complexities inherent in the study of King Lear, Muir says:
The play is not, as some of our grandfathers believed, pessimistic and pagan: it is rather an attempt to provide an answer to the undermining of traditional ideas by the new philosophy that called all in doubt. . . In a world of lust, cruelty, and greed, with extremes of wealth and poverty, man reduced to his essential needs not wealth, nor power, nor even physical freedom, but rather patience, stoical fortitude, and love; needs perhaps, above all, mutual forgiveness, the exchange of charity, and those sacrifices on which the gods, if there are any gods, throw incense. (li)
Returning to the question of how the logic of justice operates in King Lear, and how the ‘promised end’, according to some critics, should be the reconciliation scene, we have all sorts of explanations. Does the play finally express a meaningless and cruel universe or a providential one? Critics have increasingly, since the 1960s, leaned toward the view that Lear dies unhappy, a victim ‘more sinned against than sinning’ (3.2.60), and anyone who blames the victim is lacking in compassion. Muir remarks that if Cordelia was chosen to die, it simply means that the gods do not intervene to prevent us from killing each other, and it is because of
her very virtues that she was the victim: like “in the old legends it was always the pure and innocent who were chosen to propitiate the dragon”(liii), Cordelia’s honesty was literally her only reward.
The text in a play like King Lear provides opportunities for the actor to impress the audience with his/her own reading of the part, to call attention to lines that can be used as a keystone for many different interpretations according to the director’s choices. Finally, my goal is to place each production involving different techniques and aesthetic aspirations within a larger contextual field and to suggest the extent to which the meaning and significance of each are intimately tied to circumstances in which they were produced and received.
KING LEAR IN PERFORMANCE IN ENGLAND
1.1 AT SHAKESPEARE’S TIME
Before addressing the issue of King Lear at Shakespeare’s time, I would like to consider some important aspects of Elizabethan times and conditions of dramatic performance. Different historical periods have interpreted Shakespeare in different ways, and in order to understand the challenges facing the production of a specific play in various periods, we have to start by overviewing the functions of the Shakespearean plays on the Elizabethan stage and its subsequent eras. One way of bridging the gap is to imagine what it meant to live under the material conditions determining human existence in Shakespeare’s time and deduce what the performing consequences of these conditions might have been. So it seems important to point out that this Renaissance atmosphere in Northern Europe under study here is not the Middle Ages anymore: it is the Elizabethan Age, with a strong edge of Tudor characteristics, and this period does not remain the same from beginning to end. Elizabeth reigned for forty-five years (1558-1603), and when we think of Shakespeare as quintessentially Elizabethan, we have to remember that he was born in 1564, which is very near the beginning of the Queen´s reign, but his adult career did not start until thirty years later, near the period’s end, and Shakespeare outlived it, after all.
At Shakespeare’s time the spirit of the Renaissance was beginning to change people’s way of looking at life and at themselves. The term Renaissance, meaning rebirth, is used to describe the flowering of art, scholarship and literature. Between 1536 and 1556 it is estimated that one fifth of all available land changed hands due to the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and the largest proportion of this land was granted to untitled
gentry who began to gain power during Elizabeth’s reign, opposing an economic and therefore secular power to the ancient nobility whose position was achieved through the laws of succession. This is reflected in a popular proverb of the day, “As riseth my good, so riseth my blood” (Kirkland and Papp 19).
When Italian scholars began to look into the long-buried works of ancient authors such as Homer, Plato and Virgil, they were releasing a vigorous new influence into all the Western culture. This cultural explosion eventually arrived in England, and education, which was formerly dominated by clergymen, became a prestigious possession now available not only for the very rich. When knowledge broke out of the cloisters and became available to society, who had hitherto been denied the chance to study could be schooled beyond the basics.
In London anything approaching theatrical organization was just beginning, and the professional acting companies of men and boys were slowly evolving from groups of itinerant
Elizabeth I reigned for forty-five years (1558-1603)
that “Players were a royal pleasure, and to please royalty was a major aim of the companies” (Shakespearean Stage 19). Throughout the medieval period, drama was for amateurs, since usually only Bible-based plays were performed by respectable members of the society. Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland in Shakespeare Alive! inform that “the wandering forefathers of the sixteenth-century actors split into two groups over time: the musicians (what we now think of as minstrels), and the professional players who were still under the protection of a nobleman (121).
The first playhouse in London was built in 1576 by James Burbage, a carpenter by profession before becoming a full-time actor. The construction of The Theatre for dramatic representations in the English language was an event that altered everything in the theater forever after. Burbage’s building, “. . . a wooden, unroofed amphitheater, close kin to bear-baiting houses and the innyards . . .” (Gurr Shakespearean Stage 82), certainly had the great advantage of being a place where the actor could collect money from the audience before the beginning of the play. Still according to Gurr, all subsequent public theatres of this time followed Burbage’s basic plan, as The Curtain, The Swan, The Rose, The Fortune, and The Globe itself were many-sided, open-air amphitheatres with a wooden frame, a paved yard and
a projected stage.
In the decades leading to 1576, different groups of actors were strolling around England, but unlike their medieval predecessors, part of them earned the better part of their incomes from the hat they passed around at the end of their performances. According to Kirkland and Papp these groups were “. . . usually smaller than the old-religious ones, about five to eight people, and limited to one or two packhorses” (141). This meant that they were severely restricted in the props, costumes and stage machinery they could take along, resulting in very simple productions.
When young Shakespeare arrived in London by 1590, the city was the theatre capital of the “world”, with three public playhouses disputing the growing audience: the aforementioned The Theatre, The Curtain, and The Rose, with “. . . players moving from group to group as their financial circumstances pushed them (Gurr Shakespearean Stage 27). London’s population was “around 160,000 and rivalries must have been fierce, since the theatre circles were relatively small and most of the actors knew each other” (Kirkland and Papp 111). Also, given the strict laws of the time, a theatre play had to observe certain orthodoxies and conventions:
Government regulation of the companies grew up as a natural concomitant of both the government’s and the companies’ interests. The government gained by its power to limit plays, players, and playhouses in what was spoken and by whom, and by the incidental command of the quality of the players who entertained the Court. The players gained above all protection from hostile local authorities. In the later years they profited by the security of the artificially monopolistic situation maintained under the Revels Office, and by such protection as the Master of the Revels could offer in preventing unauthorized performing or printing of the various companies’ repertories. (Gurr Shakespearean Stage 51)
Throughout the late 1590’s into the early 1600’s, the London stage was controlled by two major companies, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Lord Admiral’s Men. R. A.
that theatres were “primarily concerned with making money” (Shakespeare’s Elizabethan 17), suggesting that the 1590’s gave way to “a quieter style (of play and acting), more suited to a new range of plays concerned less with battles, conquests, and spectacle than with romance and domesticity” (18).
According to John R. Brown in Free Shakespeare,
….The Elizabethan theater was irrepressibly popular. A single acting company, without permanent subsidy except for work done, could operate continuously for nearly fifty years. The Head of State and his senior officers, unskilled workers, learned scholars and the innovating, rebellious young, all patronized the same plays and the same theatre companies. Clearly the success of this theatre was different from that of our own, and so were the conditions of performance. (49)
“Elizabethan theatre was fashionable”, continues Brown, adding that “audience was in the daylight. . . there was no scenic illusion to set tone or location, . . . only costumes and a few properties changed” (49-50). If Brown is right we can assume that actors probably worked less subtly, and must have been more outgoing and physical in order to sustain any illusion of reality. Foakes recognizes that “when we look back to a distant period it is hard to imagine day-to-day changes and developments, and easy to accept . . . a unitary ‘Elizabethan stage ‘” (Elizabethan Stages 10). However precarious this way of working may seem, since there was no scenery or scene painting as such, but simple stage properties, the consequence of the lessening control would be the freeing of the audience, as well as the actor. The actor’s main resource must have been “his ability to adapt to the play as it was played on each individual occasion (Brown 52). “In addition”, Brown continues, “instead of a director, there would be a book keeper, as the Elizabethans called their functionary who combined the jobs of prompter and stage-manager” (52). This way of working is illustrated by the practice in Elizabethan theatres of not giving the actor the full text of the play in which he was to perform, but only his own part. If we agree with the idea that Elizabethan theatre gave performances that
changed daily, and since space and time were not represented visually, we have to accept Brown’s remark:
Supposing that King Lear were ‘set upon a stage,’ forgetting scenery and carefully drilled production support, and placing the audience in the same clear light, what might be seen? . . . The actor would be a man among other men, in space, seeking a performance controlled by the words and based in his own imaginative conception and physical creation of his role. . . the Elizabethans (actors) flourished under these conditions; and so did their dramatists, and their audiences. (54-5)
The fact that plays were likely to be changed in the acting process, as actors decided which line worked and which did not, makes us believe that the stagings of the plays that we have now are often different from what Shakespeare originally wrote and also quite different from what happened in performance. Foakes points out that “The life a play has in the mind may be very different from the life it has on the stage. King Lear, which is a long and complex work, may rarely have been acted in full, and has usually been cut, rearranged or reworked for performance” (4). Only later were versions of these performances turned into printed books. According to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor,
King Lear first appeared in print in a quarto of 1608. A substantially different text
appeared in the 1623 Folio. Until now, editors, assuming that each of these early texts imperfectly represented a single play, have conflated them. But research conducted mainly during the 1970’s and 1980’s confirms an earlier view that the 1608 quarto represents the play as Shakespeare originally wrote it, and the 1623 Folio as he substantially revised it. (909)
Wells and Taylor also draw our attention to the fact that “there are two distinct plays of
King Lear, not merely two different texts of the same play; so we print edited versions of both
the Quarto (‘The History of. . .’) and the Folio (‘The Tragedy of. . .”)(xxxvii). Tracking the material sources of these texts can reveal a hidden history of staging, where collaboration produced — and still does — altogether different interpretations of the same play. Andrew Gurr in Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London mentions that
Militarism and hostility to Spain and Spain’s Catholicism amongst London audiences found mirrors on stage. For more than ten years wars and stories of wars were the main meal on the broad platforms of the amphitheatres. (132)
Later the same author affirms: “Playgoing became a uniform custom in the 1590s for a variety of reasons. The only playhouses available were amphitheatres, which made one kind of choice uniform” (133). When in 1599 The Globe was built, a beginning of a new era of prosperity for the Chamberlain’s Men and for William Shakespeare started. There is relatively little direct evidence about audience reception of Shakespeare’s plays during his lifetime, since “few playgoers took the trouble to record their thoughts about their afternoons entertainment” (Wiggins 30). At Shakespeare’s time it seemed to be important that the location of the new theatre was considered ideal, “just south of the riverbank, not far from the competing Lord Admiral’s Men at The Rose”, and the effective result was that “The Globe and The Rose probably drew about 1250 people apiece daily, about half of their capacity, being bigger for the first performance of a new play and on the public holidays” (Papp and Kirkland 143).
When James I (James VI of Scotland) came to the English throne in 1603, plays became a royal pleasure, with the king granting royal patronage to chief London companies. Shakespeare’s acting company, which thus became the King’s Men, performed before the court in the royal palaces, as well as to audiences in the public theatres. The tendency to think that Shakespeare and his fellows acquired fame and popularity under the reign of King James needs to be perspectivised when we read in Wiggins that there is strong evidence that “for the sake of public health or public order, the London playhouses were frequently closed between 1603 and 1608, perhaps more often than they were open” (28). To be a shareholder in a London company was to be involved in a commercial enterprise with a substantial turnover in both income and expenditure. In these circumstances, the King’s Men needed to maximize their income during the periods when they were able to perform.
In 1609 the King’s Men acquired an indoor theatre, the Blackfriars, to use in addition to The Globe, “but it is not known whether the company operated separate repertories at the two theatres (Wiggins 28). Several of The Globe’s actors became nationally famous, and while some characters grew to be coextensive with the plays in which they appeared, others transcended them. Some of Shakespeare’s great tragic characters, including King Lear, were written for Richard Burbage, who had made his name as an actor who portrayed emotion realistically, while Robert Armin, the company’s comedian, was probably the first to play the Fool. As pointed out by Wiggins, “The careers of Shakespeare and Burbage had coincided with, and to a large extent contributed to, a quarter century of exceptional creativity in English drama and theatre” (38).
Not much is known about King Lear in performance in Shakespeare’s time. Stanley Wells’ statement that “Like most plays of the time, King Lear had been performed before it appeared in print” (the play was entered in the Stationer’s Register on 26 November 1607) (4) confirms Halio’s claim that “Although King Lear is a difficult play, it is not difficult to stage. . .. The play thus eminently suited the bare apron stage of The Globe, where it was probably performed in 1605, although the first record of any performance is at court on 26 December 1606” (39).
However, still in what concerns the performances of a play, the chief distinction between London’s companies and travelling companies was their size, and rather than display a finished and highly worked production, the Elizabethan theatre gave performances that changed daily. To conclude, the differences between Elizabethan performances and
contemporary ones are of great importance, and clearly the success of that theatre was different from our own. We can only have some insights of how Shakespeare’s plays were performed and received and occasionally notice how different from our own were the physical conditions in which the actors had to work. The main difference was that the audience was not placed at a distance, but at a position of close contact created by the actors with all their powers. Since Elizabethan performances were visually simple, movement and voice would have to be lively and physically strong. The main action took place on the main stage, and because it was surrounded on three sides by the audience, it could create an intimacy we do not get today on the conventional stage with a proscenium arch. Soliloquies could appear to be spoken confidentially to the audience and sound less artificial than they often do today. Also, where contemporary scenery provides the settings, Shakespeare had to provide scenery by means of the text, as in the storm scene in King Lear, the words “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” (3.2.1) would be accompanied by noises of thunder. However precarious this way of working may seem to us, such limitations must have provided variety and excitement, and under these conditions Shakespeare’s plays flourished.
1.2 IN THE RESTORATION
So far as the evidence enables us to judge, the King’s Men acting company had been royalistic since 1603, when James I issued privileged status to its shareholding members; according to John Russell Brown, “Early in 1613, the King’s Men presented fourteen plays at court, and a little later the same season repeated two of them and added four more titles” (50). Later, when King Charles I divorced from the Parliament on 10th January 1642, the English
any kind of plays, claiming that the public stage did not well agree with calamities. “The world turned upside-down” (39), Wiggins affirms, adding that
English civil authorities have often responded to the start of a war by closing places of public entertainment; the Civil War in 1642 was no exception. . . London’s theatres were officially closed by a Parliament seeking ‘all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God’. It was the beginning of the end for the King’s Men. . . . This was neither the first nor the last time that the capital’s theatres were closed during a period of national emergency. (39)
Gary Taylor, who seems to see parallels between the monarchy and the theatre, writes: “The English monarchy and the English theatre fell together. . . . And when they rose again, they rose together” (9). All the theatres closed when Charles I was sentenced to death, and when his son and heir Charles II was restored to the throne, public performances were again allowed. And even though playhouses were closed for almost twenty years, with the advent of the Restoration, drama was back and strongly anchored in the House of Lords, the Anglican Church and of course, the monarchy. When the English court came back from the exile in France, it brought the freeness of and manners which reflected much of French influence, “there was, to quote the document which officially reopened the theatres, ‘ an extraordinary license used in things of this nature’” (Wiggins 44).
What happened in the theatres in 1642 isolates and makes unusually clear a process that affects works of art and thought whenever confronted by the new established status quo. A performance may lead to micro-political engagement with the community through and thereby transgressing and challenging the desirable hegemonic identity. The affirmation that “One of the many permanently relevant questions which King Lear explores is the nature of power, its perils and possibilities” (Salgado 34) still holds. Although English theatre was revived by the Stuart dynasty and many of Shakespeare’s plays were immediately performed after the restoration of the monarchy, “King Lear [reappearing] in 1664, but [seeming] to have provided no hint of the immense success it would enjoy in Nahum Tates´s version of 1681”
(Dobson 51), it is true to say that the theatrical sensibility in post-Civil War England was a distinctive one if compared to what happened fifty years before.
If we look closely at the productions staged during the period known as the Restoration, we cannot help notice some obviously new material characteristics in public theatres, such as the end of the outdoor playhouse and the enlargement of the area behind the proscenium arch. Michael Dobson affirms: “Sumptuously baroque in costume and music, technologically sophisticated in design and elegant in diction, the Shakespeare of the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage belonged at least as much to the Enlightenment as to the Renaissance . . . in every sense a new perspective on theatrical production” (45). Perhaps more relevant than all that was the fact that the texts were adapted to suit the new audiences and that actresses were performing women’s roles. Women began to appear on English stages “. . . at the same time that pornography began to appear on English bookstalls” (Taylor 19).
Taylor adds that “adaptations . . . — Nahum Tate’s King Lear, to name only the
King Lear at the Queen’s Theatre, showing
Restoration’s treatment of Shakespeare” (20). The process of adaptation during the Restoration greatly differs from what happened in earlier periods. Only during the Restoration those changes turned into printed books, like Tate’s aforementioned adaptation of King Lear, when he opted to remove the Fool, and in addition created a love plot between Cordelia and Edgar. Tate’s version, which was performed for almost 140 years, gave a happy ending to
King Lear in which the bad are punished and the good rewarded, as a way to bring the play
closer to the taste patterns of the time.
Moreover, part of Tate’s reason for adapting is not simply to accommodate the audience, but to create a text that is less sensitive to political issues of the time. The History of
King Lear was adapted from Shakespeare’s text after the Restoration of Charles II to the
throne and therefore intends to create a theme of restoration that is not present in Shakespeare. Ironically, Tate’s attempts to concentrate meaning for a specific society have diminished the strength of his ideas over time. Halio argues that while adapting King Lear, Tate has also substantially flattened the play (“Introduction” 37).
It could also be argued that Tate’s decision to give his play a happy ending brought the story closer to Holinshed’s Chronicles, which was Shakespeare’s source and in which Cordelia’s forces won the war at the end, ruling thereafter. Tate’s play is full of recognition on the part of Lear, whereas at the end of Shakespeare’s play, the sources are changed in order to express convictions, discharging the happy-ending of the original story, in which Cordelia triumphs in battle and Lear is restored to his throne. Shakespeare has Lear die over the body of his dead Cordelia, revealing a bitter split between the ideal and the real, when virtue, acquired through suffering and experience, is not rewarded. Halio argues that “Whatever the truth may be, available evidence does not point to Lear as a frequently performed play. The theme of fallen royalty and the absence of a love story may explain its lack of popularity. The situation
changed after 1681, when Nahum Tate rewrote it to suit contemporary taste” (“Introduction” 37).
For the next century and a half audiences preferred Tate’s happy-ending version of the play, but directors, as well as managers and producers, have always changed plays mostly in order to improve finances. Tate’s version was also modified: Dobson claims that “adaptations as these, whatever their ostensible politics, had fitted Shakespearean tragedy to the comparatively bourgeois tastes and demands of the later Restoration and eighteenth century” (58). As we shall see, the eighteenth century King Lear changed into a curious mixture of early pieces of Shakespeare’s Quartos and Folio together with Tate’s adaptation. The economic reasons were always clear, since old plays were plentiful, and their authors did not need to be paid for their work, almost all the Restoration repertoire consisting of adaptations of old plays.
1.3 IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : THE “AGE OF GARRICK”
The eighteenth century was a time of great material improvement and theatres prospered, demonstrating the commercial vitality of the entertainment industry. The expansion of theatrical auditoriums in London was accompanied by the erection of new theatres in the provinces. Outside London, England “was better equipped with theatres in the late eighteenth century than in the late twentieth” (Taylor 115). From Taylor’s statement we can assume that this artistic vitality created a demand for plays; in fact, referring to the eighteenth century, Halio remarks that “more and more editions of Shakespeare’s works began appearing” (“Introduction” 39). By contrast, Tate’s version of King Lear would still be pleasing audiences
and would not be removed from the acting texts “until the 1830’s” (Wiggins 58), nearly two hundred years after the Restoration.
By every measure of material prosperity the eighteenth century was good to England, and artistic vitality expanded the theatrical market. Peter Holland argues that as regards “English Theatre the mid-eighteenth century cannot be called anything other than the Age of Garrick. No one had ever achieved such dominance over the stage” (69). David Garrick ran Drury Lane Theatre, combining the functions “of leading actor and what we would call artistic director, to the considerable profit both of himself and the theatre” (Taylor 115). As an actor, Garrick always privileged serious dramas, and, as stated by Taylor, “Drury Lane had a virtual monopoly on serious drama, while its competitors devoted themselves to opera or popular pantomime” (118). As an actor and producer, Garrick frequently claimed that he was bringing back the original texts, as written by Shakespeare. In promoting Shakespeare, however, he was always promoting himself and his company. For Holland,
Advertisement for Mr. Garrick performing King Lear at the
Garrick’s most decisive innovation was the refusal to fix the text into an unalterable mode. While his performance of the particular Shakespeare roles which he claimed as his territory quickly settled, establishing the approach to character, the reading of the part, early in his confrontation with each one and then continuing to play that same interpretation for the rest of his career, his approach to the playing-text was one of continual consideration, re-evaluation, and restoration. While Garrick’s first and last performances as Lear, thirty-four years apart, would have been recognizably the same, the Lear of his farewell season spoke far more Shakespeare than would have been conceivable earlier. (72)
In the eighteenth century Shakespeare was repeatedly considered the world’s greatest dramatist and poet and helped in the development of a consciously English art, as an effort to celebrate English cultural independence, now defied by some other Europeans and even Americans who slowly started to expand their international reputation. Taylor states that “England’s victory in the Seven Years War was a decisive event in the growing international resistance to French political and cultural hegemony and Shakespeare was the chief artistic beneficiary of that resistance . . . . The English acclaimed Shakespeare as their greatest and most characteristic genius” (122).
According to Halio, “King Lear in the eighteenth century is thus a curious combination of Shakespeare and Tate. The Folio text, moreover, may not have been totally eclipsed. It was in its ‘Tatefied’ form, however, that King Lear rose in popularity, though it did not rival the other great Shakespearean tragedies” (“Introduction” 39). Halio also brings evidence that “The several versions of Garrick’s Lears show how fluid the play remained in the hands of a capable and dynamic actor-manager” (39). The interpenetrations of aesthetic and political values in King Lear can still be seen in Garrick’s age, but despite all adaptations, Shakespeare’s cultural supremacy survived and was acclaimed throughout the eighteenth century.
art forms at the end of the eighteenth century. Actors and scenes from popular plays were among the favorite subjects for prints at an age when English art drew much from the theatre. Moreover, publishing of all kinds of books, newspapers and magazines was one of the most successful industries of the period; discussing the flourishing print industry, Taylor mentions that “publishers searched for new ways to package the same old product. . . and other editions contributed to the marketing of Shakespeare troughout and beyond the English speaking world” (128-29). England’s prosperity in the eighteenth century was built on its success as a trading nation, and Shakespeare was one of its most successful cultural exports.
1.4 IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Europe began the nineteenth century dominated by the romantics and their beliefs in feelings, intuition, and imagination. Once more Shakespeare’s plays became the object of repeated readings. Different from the previous century, the age of literary Romanticism and of Romantic criticism of Shakespeare “was also the age of melodrama” (Taylor 138). Melodrama was introduced in Drury Lane and Covent Garden and was mainly popular and proletarian in theme and treatment. New interpretations of Shakespeare were everywhere, and according to Bate there was “a tendency in illegitimate Shakespeare to familiarize elevated material, to bring high tragedy down to the level of the audience” (105). At the same time, melodrama emphasizes “extremes of emotion and reaction together, breaching the social decorum which proclaims tragedy high and comedy low” (106). The burlesque overhauls Shakespeare’s original in order to make it appeal to a specific audience, giving nineteenth century theatre-goers what they wanted from Shakespeare, in a clear effort to make plays fit that particular period of time.
At this point it may be useful to glance at the wider context of nineteenth century social and technological changes in England, if only because we can thereby gain a sharper focus on the kind of social energy that shaped Victorian perception of Shakespeare and how these changes greatly affected intellectual tastes. Innovations revolutionized productivity, efficiency, prices, and working conditions, but mostly the rise of literacy in middle and working classes was accompanied by changes in the distribution of printed matter. Taylor mentions that “Between 1828 and 1853 average book prices declined 40 percent, . . . including of course reprints of Shakespeare” (184). Shakespeare’s plays were not only seen on stage, as in previous centuries, but also became the object of repeated readings.
Charles and Mary Lamb first published Tales from Shakespeare in 1807 as condensations of Shakespeare for young middle-class children, since by the nineteenth century a familiarity with Shakespeare’s texts was expected of every educated person, and most readers, as stated by Taylor, “first encountered him in versions deliberately reshaped to make them fit for tender minds” (209). At that time reading was a way of recovering literary meanings rather than producing the text as an acted drama.
King Lear’s tragedy was then best known in the way Keats described his encounter
with the play. The poem’s title is as revealing as its location. Keats sits down, to “read” King
Lear again: “On sitting down to read King Lear once again.” The fact indicates that Lear
was more powerful on page than on stage, and it was a poet’s duty to revisit the “printed” King. Keats finds King Lear “bitter-sweet” and does not mention any of the characters of the play. The poem Keats wrote is a sonnet, and itself an act of reverence to Shakespeare’s sonnets that had been reprinted only once after the first publication in 1609.
Although the Romantics quoted and criticized Hamlet intensely, they admired King
Lear even more. Referring to Keats and his admiration for King Lear, Taylor writes: “it was King Lear he chose to illustrate his famous axiom that ‘the excellence of every Art is its
intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate’ ” (159). Jonathan Bate mentions an essay published in 1811 by Charles Lamb in the Reflector, in which he famously argues that
King Lear “should not be staged” because it fostered self-promotion of actors like Garrick
and also partly because the original text was “butchered” by adaptors like Nahum Tate. Here is Lamb, as quoted by Bate:
On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized (sic) from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. (93) If for Keats King Lear should better be read than performed, and for Lamb it was an impossible play to be staged, for the Romantic intellectuals it could only be admired if printed, since, as we have seen, “in the theatre one merely saw Lear, whereas alone in the study one could be Lear” (ibid).
Miss Eliza Logan as Cordelia. (England, middle-nineteenth century)
The mental illness of old king George III was a serious political reason to discontinue the performances of King Lear, as the play would suggest uncomfortable parallels with the living royal family. For an imaginative reader, George III or King Lear might be transformed into a tragic hero who maintains the organic ancient core of power. For the romantics Lear became the colossal father-king, representing power located paradoxically in the frail body of an old man. King Lear embodies the metaphor of the king as a father, the children as subjects, with much of the preservation of society depending upon the children’s obedience to the king. The unfilial behavior of Goneril and Reagan had also driven the old king to insanity. A breakdown of authority and the imaginative identification between the father-child symbol would again provide an uncomfortable resemblance to George III. To be sure, when the mad king died in 1820, the two patented theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, “were quick to stage revivals of King Lear, but within days a third rival version could be seen at the Coburg: a melodrama by W.T. Moncrieff called The Lear of Private Life! or, Father and Daughter” (Bate 105). In Bate’s view, Moncrieff’s intention was to borrow the title character in order “to bring high tragedy down to the level of the audience” (ibid).
Victorian scholars dedicated much of their time to the study of past languages and literature, in the search of hidden meanings and also to draw indirect allusions to contemporary issues. Taylor affirms that the “educated insistence on an authentic text, like the insistence on pictorial accuracy, belonged to the period’s intensifying sensitivity to historical development” (201). Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear is no longer prevalent because, ironically, his attempts to concentrate meaning on a specific society have diminished the strength of his ideas over time, and “It was Macready’s 1838 production which finally reintroduced the Fool into Lear, over 150 years after Nahum Tate had banished him” (Bate 111).
Certainly different forms of adaptation of King Lear can be interpreted and defended as a decision to be free to carry out creative impulses, and also by assuming that in art authenticity much depends on personal values. Unlike the situation in the beginning of the century, many of the theatre-goers at the end of the period were not scholars but merely listeners and spectators who would rather watch Shakespeare coming to life through sounds
and movement of actors like Edwin Forrest and W.E. Sheridan than through the pages of a book.
1.5 IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
During the twentieth century many productions have made distinguished attempts to prove that Charles Lamb was wrong when he said that King Lear was unactable. Since only the Bible has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare, his inventiveness and versatility seem to have had no bounds, supplying his plays with contemporary elements that reflect immediate concerns of the audience. Such is the versatility of these productions that any sensitive discussion of King Lear in performance must evoke the multiple ways in which the twentieth century recreates Shakespeare’s texts, inspiring reflection upon the processes of reproduction. Halio, for instance, suggests that “each age discovered new ways of representing the characters in King Lear”, adding that “Changes reflect changing tastes in art and drama, the abilities of specific actors, and directorial ‘concepts’” (“Introduction” 45).
Gamini Salgado appropriately remarked that “as readers, actors or directors, our knowledge of Shakespeare’s dramatic art obviously depends on the text of his plays. But the question, what is a Shakespearean text?, is simpler to ask than to answer” (70). The text-performance dichotomy has preoccupied Shakespeare studies for decades, always trying to conceive how the theatrical experience is able to shift from page to stage replacing written words with acting scenes. The growth of the radio and the cinema as ways of entertainment and their significance were associated to popular culture to an extent never before seen in the theatre. Culture started to be sold as a commodity, a product that lends luster to the one who sponsored such cultural activities. The situation that can be regarded as a gradual
demystification of the relationship between art and commerce was not different in England than it was in the rest of the Western developed world.
Anthony Davies points out that
By the 1920’s, then, the impulses behind the growth of British theatre were moving in two directions; one towards small decentralized repertory companies whose audiences were being exposed to the idea of plays as entertainment through the development of the cinema and, later, the accessibility of radio drama, and another towards centralization of a national repertory theatre, financed by national and municipal subsidy. (140)
Later Davies adds that the evolution of the theatrical presentation of Shakespearean plays during the first half of the twentieth century, and with “subsidy still no more than a vision”, much depended on the dedication and energy of Lilian Baylis and Barry Jackson, who, “not calmed by the poor resources. . .” (140), provided regular seasons to the Old Vic’s audiences. By 1918, with the help of Ben Greet as the director, the company was “giving regular seasons of Shakespeare to its audiences” (141).
The conviction that Shakespeare addressed his best works to a cultural elite also found expression in less orthodox venues. The growth of graduate schools and the redefinition of universities as research institutions expanded the scholarly base, increasing the number of people employed to study, teach, and write about Shakespeare. Major works were aimed at a more circunscribed audience. In the early twentieth century some iconoclastic productions of Shakespeare were performed by amateur actors manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. Old-staging productions originated in the same insistence upon material authenticity. Shaw, like Booth and William Poel, insisted on historical accuracy and material circumstances of Renaissance England, trying to reconstruct the reality the plays themselves envisaged. Taylor mentions that according to Shaw “Shakespeare’s plays could not be defended as representations of human behavior; they could be appreciated only as musical scores for several voices” (268). Objections to Victorian rearrangement of
Shakespeare’s text were based on the fact that “such alterations destroyed the ‘design’ of the composition, just as they would destroy a Mozart symphony” (ibid). In part these opinions only developed a way out of the Victorian historicism, for the desired authenticity could never be achieved in the way it was to Elizabethan audiences. If Shakespeare’s actors originally performed in contemporary costumes, then it would be more authentic for modern productions to have their costumes equally made in a contemporary way.
In a century that has changed to be a world of mass production, there was the competition with films which radically redefined the nature of drama. The first building “specially designed as a cinema opened in 1907” (Taylor 273), and hundreds of films were produced adapting Shakespeare’s plays. With the advent of sound, films could even incorporate Shakespeare’s dialogue, integrating music and movement to a text which most of the times was heavily abridged. Shakespeare’s plays could be interpreted on two levels corresponding to the social division of educated upper classes and uneducated masses. Thereafter cinema became entertainment for everyman while live theatre became a minority taste, an art for the elite, and as social historians have shown, revealing ruptures among the ways of social and communicative actions, that increasingly had the tendency to collide. For some, the new methods of contemporary creation were merely inferior art and should be treated as a special suspect category, while to others they are symbols of the transition from book culture to electronic culture. Michael Anderegg, in his preface to Orson Welles
Shakespeare and Popular Culture, states that the modern media is a valuable “attempt to
popularize and disseminate Shakespeare and unlike stage productions, they exist in a more or less permanent form and thus allow us to better evaluate the relationship between a text and its reception” (x).
Anthony Davies mentions Galsworthy, Granville-Barker, Shaw, and Archer, “who opened a season at the Court Theatre in Sloane Square on 18 October 1904” (139), as regards their attempt to create a new English drama, redefining Shakespeare for the twentieth century, while at the same time claimed for a British National Theatre and the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee. Later Davies argues that the same committee helped to fund the establishment of the first permanent repertory company at the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, which evolved into the Royal Shakespeare Company (140). In 1923 Archer shifted his support to the Old Vic, which would eventually evolve into the National Theatre, and “established itself as a theatre giving regular seasons of Shakespeare to its audiences” (ibid).
The Royal Shakespeare Company dominates Shakespeare production in London, and unlike its rivals in the capital, operates nationally and internationally. Taylor reports that “The RSC runs two theatres in London and three in Stratford; it performs for five weeks a year in Newcastle, and some touring productions are frequently shown to audiences in New York and Los Angeles, Washington DC and cities in Australia” (305). Don E. Wayne considers that under the direction of Peter Hall and, subsequently, Trevor Nunn, the RSC built its reputation for producing Shakespeare from the vantage point of “a modernist aesthetic and, at times, from an avowed concern with contemporary political and social issues” (49). Distinct from both the orthodox representations of vice and virtue, the RSC is not unified nor conclusive, but somewhat open-ended, with a multiplicity of divergent social and cultural functions and by its standards other companies are judged.
Early in the history of the RSC, such was the versatility of some of its productions that Shakespeare’s cultural presence frequently promoted political identities and disrupted the bourgeois status quo: “I am a radical, and I could not work in the theatre if I were not. The
theatre must question everything and disturb its audience”, said Peter Hall in the early stages of the Company. (qtd. in Sinfield 172). In the second half of the twentieth century the RSC is often considered the most successful theatrical organization in the Western world, in the case of some productions, having evolved from a nostalgic theatrical company pleasing tourist-pilgrims to Stratford into a major, innovative company of international renown.
Granville-Barker does not share Charles Lamb´s opinion about King Lear, and in his famous critical prefaces on the plays of Shakespeare he argues that “ Shakespeare meant it to be acted, and he was a very practical playwright. So that should count for something. Acted it was, and with success enough for it to be presented before the king at Whitehall . . . And Burbage’s performance of King Lear remained a vivid memory. At the Restoration it was one of the nine plays selected by Davenant for his theatre” (261). Later Granville- Barker adds that Lamb’s essay “should be read as a whole”, since “the theatre alternately delighted and exasperated him” (262).
In the twentieth century King Lear has been performed more often than it was at any other time since the Renaissance. The “very concept of royalty in the Western world,” Foakes argues, “becomes increasingly hard to grasp, while at the same time a distrust of authority in all its forms becomes more widespread;” and if “an anxiety grows about a steadily aging population, the emphasis in productions of King Lear would inevitably reflect these changing conditions” (26). Recent productions have often set out to show the overwhelming pathos of an old man petted and humbled, disarmed and then restored to peace and gratitude. Lear as everyman in a modern world tends to be characterized as a victim of violent forces in an uncaring society rather than as an agent, an authoritarian monarch causing the violence that destroys him.
King Lear has always offered challenges to readers of all kinds: in the study, on the
stage, and in the theatre audience. When we turn to actual productions of the play, we are able to notice that they represent paradigms for performance-oriented study and, collectively, a substantial exploration of the play as a whole. As seems obvious since acting became professional in late sixteenth century, a company’s success depends on attracting audiences to a play and on pleasing them. In the twentieth century, as in previous ages, the staging of King
Lear pretty much reflects the tenor of the times, while the perceived moral status of the
characters and the emotions they are meant to evoke might change according to the singularities of a particular audience. The explanation must be that the subjects of King Lear reflect a universal tragedy. The play demands that the audience think about the horrifying image to which humanity can be reduced: at the end nobody escapes and punishment is indiscriminate. The few survivors face a hopeless future. Benedict Nightingale, while analysing some recent English productions of King Lear, observes that
There have been tyrannical Lears, vain and foolish Lears, spoiled-child Lears, senile Lears, and various combinations of these; but without exception or at least without exception among the productions reviewed by the national critics, they have implicitly asked the spectators a question. It is I suppose, one which reflects the temper of a generation increasingly ill at ease with class structures, traditional hierarchies, and established authority. (226-7)
John Gielgud as King Lear.
